Searching the Past to Understand the Future

Random

02/21/2013

So...I'm not dead. I guess I've got that goin' for me. On the heels[1] of the Being Me stuff I decided I need to get out more and meet more people and say, "You know, that seems like a terrible idea, I'ma go do that," more often. It's kinda like what I tried to force myself to do with last year's Dancing Monkey Project, but it's actually working because I'd gone to great lengths to exorcise the demons that required me to try to force myself to do things like that in the past.

Or, y'know, whatever.

For the record, it's amazing how quickly life starts throwing you curveballs when you decide to do something like that and then actually follow through. Back when I was all Churchy Joe and whatnot we used to talk about the dangers of asking god to open our eyes and lead us to opportunities to do his work because, boom, those opportunities would appear. I've realized now that it's not because the universe changes, but because the way you view and interact with the universe that changes. We close our eyes and ears to so much and tune out everything that's not a direct influence on our desires and habits that we miss just how much there is out there in the world.

There's a lot of world out there, folks. It's terrible and wonderful and big and broad and there's not enough time to see all of it.

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Meanwhile, I've been letting The Gaslight Anthem grow on me. They're kinda what would happen if the guys from Sons of Bill grew up in Jersey and had a bit more of a punk influence on their style. This is a statement that makes no sense and is why people shouldn't write about music and expect to seem like they're anything other than pretentious twits, complete idiots, or completely pretentious idiots. Just, y'know, listen:

That said, they don't seem to have the ability to downshift that Sons of Bill exhibits, so their songs kinda sound the same. Still, I got Handwritten and The '59 Sound the other day and I'm not regretting the decision.

It also seems from live videos that the Gaslight guy...how do I say this...benefits from studio magic. This is not something I would say about, say, James Wilson of Sons of Bill. So I'm less likely to truck my ass out to see Gaslight live is what I'm saying.

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Speaking of Sons of Bill, they seem to have made a new video for "Virginia Calling."

I enjoy both the composition and the storytelling.

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[1]Or the heals, if you enjoy homonym-based punnery. Which I don't. Not in the least little bit.

11/28/2012

I slapped up a quick post based on a Pat Robertson video on Monday. I said that I wanted to write up a big, damn post about why Christmas is better now than it was when I was a Christian. That, of course, is kind of a hard thing to do since part of the “when I was a Christian” time was also the “when I was eight” time, and Christmas is always awesome when you’re eight. So I have to limit the idea to basically the last couple years I called myself a Christian. And that’s a-ok.

Go back to that Pat Robertson video. It’s short:

The thing that immediately strikes me about that video – and if you can watch it I’m guessing you’ll see the same thing – is that Pat seems tired, resigned, even. He’s all, “Here comes the War on Christmas again. Hoo-ray,” and he’s dragging himself back to the fight with a bunch of tired, boilerplate anti-atheist crapola. I actually feel sorry for him on some level here, at least on a limited level. But that’s because I still remember what my last few Christmases as a self-identified Christian were like.

They were, in a word, exhausting. I know exactly why they were exhausting: because I was constantly worried that I wasn’t doing Christmas right. This is a very specific idea in Evangelicalism. There is a right way to do everything and there is a wrong way. The right way is the straight and narrow path, defined by a vast collection of (sometimes unlisted) rules. The wrong way is any other way. Deviation from that wrong way is bad mojo.

For those who don’t know what life is like in the Evangelical world let me tell you: everyone deviates from the right way. It’s a constant existential crisis.

I realized this in one of those lovely moments of convergence that happen if you pay attention to the world in the way that I pay attention to the world: on Election Day.

2012 was, for me, exhausting. On a personal level I went through a whole lot of shit, most of which was good in the long-run but kinda crappy in the short run. On a global awareness level, though, I spent most of 2012 obsessing over the random minutiae of our endless political nightmare. I could not help myself. By October I was listening to Green Day’s American Idiot and Local H’s Hallelujah! I’m a Bum at least once a day. I voted two weeks early in the hope that it would allow me to just let go, but I couldn’t. I was obsessed with something that was completely outside of my control and it ate away at my every waking hour.

It was weird, too. I didn’t see any good outcome to the election. There was simply the catastrophic ending and then varying degrees of less catastrophic. Honestly, I am not a huge fan of Barack Obama. I think he’s been really good on some things and horrifying on others. The thing he mostly had going for him was that the idea of President Mitt Romney was horrifying on every level. I also basically assumed that the Senate would remain with a narrow Democratic majority and the House would remain with a Republican majority, so our best case scenario would be a repeat of the last four years. Joy.

That’s the backdrop. The important moment that I’m trying to get to happened on Election Day.

I woke up on Election Day feeling better than I had in quite some time. It wasn’t that I felt good about the outcome of the election so much as that I felt good about the fact that it was finally about to be over. One way or another everything would be finished and the awful waiting would be over. Rather than continuing my Green Day and Local H marathon I got on the train that morning and turned on some Harry Connick, Jr.[1]

That was how I found myself on Randolph Street in Chicago at lunchtime listening to “Reason to Believe,” a bouncy, happy little ditty. I was in front of the Thompson Center at Randolph between La Salle and Clark. CNN was setting up a gigantic camera rig on the corner of Randolph and Clark and for a moment I was totally confused. Then it occurred to me that, oh, they were probably doing something about the election. I kept walking.

A couple blocks later I hit State Street and looked south. The Christmas decorations were already out in front of the old Marshall Field’s store that’s now a Macy’s.[2] I went out to Michigan Avenue, walked down to Washington, and then headed back toward the office, a route which would take me past the Daley Plaza, where they’d started setting up the kriskindlmarket, a German-style temporary town square Christmas market that opens at Thanksgiving.

All of this matters because one of the lyrics in “Reason to Believe” is “I feel just like a kid on Christmas Eve/You may not know my reason/But I’ve got reason to believe.” I suddenly remembered exactly what it felt like to be a kid on Christmas Eve. It’s this moment of great anticipation and happiness.

When I was a kid I used to set up my own Christmas tree in my room. My sister and I both had these little mini aluminum trees with our own sets of ornaments. We’d put the trees up on our dressers and put the ornaments on. At some point my parents got me some strings of multi-colored lights, which was really cool since the big tree always only had white lights. I’d put a string around the tree and another one around the bookcase and then I’d tape a string to the wall or the ceiling or something and for the month of December the only light I’d have in my room came from my string of Christmas lights.

On Christmas Eve we’d go to the candlelight service at church. Then we’d go home and one of my parents would read “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” and we’d go to bed with an empty tree in the living room but I wouldn’t sleep for a long time. What kid can sleep on Christmas Eve, after all? Sometimes I’d peek out the door and see my parents putting the presents under the tree and try to guess which presents were mine and what they were.

In the morning the stockings would be full and hung on the stair railings, as we didn’t have a fireplace. My parents would let my sister and I empty our stockings while we waited (forever) for grandma to show up so the big show could begin. Nowadays, of course, that all seems so…childish. But I can remember what it feels like to be a kid on Christmas and I can remember what if feels like to be a kid on Christmas Eve and that matters.

That’s not all I remember. I grew up in the suburbs with two parents who mostly worked in the city. At some point over the Christmas break my mother would get my sister and I on the train and we’d ride downtown, usually on the upper deck of the Metra trains because that had the better view. Then we’d meet my dad and we’d spend the night at the Palmer House[3]. The next day we’d go the Marshall Field’s and line up for lunch under the tree in the Walnut Room and to get Mistletoe Bears and look at the windows on State Street. Then we’d go over the Carson’s and see their windows.

Over the years, of course, things changed. We stopped doing the Palmer House thing. For a few years I didn’t go into the city at all at Christmas because I was at college and my break time was me working because I needed every dollar I could earn. Last year I was working in the Loop and I went to meet my parents for lunch in the Walnut Room then went back to the office. On Christmas Eve we got let out of the office at noon, so I hopped the Red Line and went up and had lunch at the Goose Island brewpub, then headed back to the Loop and got Gluwein and strudel at the kriskindlmarket before meeting my family for dinner and going to the CSO's Christmas Eve performance.

Things change is what I’m saying. That’s life.

I started my own tradition in 2008. On the first weekend in December I pulled out my hand-me-down artificial tree and my collection of ornaments, some of which were hand-me-downs from my sister and brother-in-law (who gave them to me along with the tree), some of which were even older hand-me-downs from other relatives, some of which were gifts I’d received over the years, and some of which were the very same ornaments I’d hung on that little tree I’d put on my dresser all those years ago. I put on Harry Connick, Jr.’s When My Heart Finds Christmas and a Santa hat and I decorated my tree with a truly disturbing number of lights I’d just bought at the Menard’s (450 lights for a 6.5’ tree. Blinding) and a truly gaudy light-up plastic star I’d found for $8 at Walgreen’s when I realized I had no tree topper whatsoever.

Why Harry Connick, Jr., you ask? Funny question, that. One year at Christmas during junior high I wanted nothing more than a CD player. My parents, in their typical way, gave me CDs. I think I got three or four but the two I can remember for whatever reason were the Aladdin Soundtrack and Harry Connick, Jr.’s When My Heart Finds Christmas. I have absolutely no idea why they chose those particular CDs. I really don’t. But I remember being confused and a bit disappointed at the whole having CDs but not having a CD player thing. They told me that I could listen to them downstairs on the big sound system. Then, finally, once all the little presents were open, we got to the big presents, which was the tradition. My big present that year was an RCA boombox with a dual tape deck and a CD player. It was the best thing ever.

A few months later I’d buy Soundgarden’s Superunknown and play it on that boombox. That marked the beginning of my love of rock and all that came from that. I can also tell you exactly where my copy of Harry Connick, Jr.’s When My Heart Finds Christmas is right now. Even though I'm honest when I tell you I have no idea what possessed my parents to buy that particular album for me when I was 13. I can tell you, though, that at 31 I listen to that album every Christmas when I’m setting up my tree.

My Christmas tree still has a bunch of random hand-me-downs. It also has a bunch of ornaments I’ve been accumulating over the years. There’s my White Sox 2005 World Series ornament. There’s the goofy Texas ornaments my family got me before I moved to Texas (in 2009, the year without a Christmas tree, since I was packing to move in December). There’s the goofy bottlebrush gorilla I got last year that graces the donation icon on the right-hand sidebar of this blog. There’s the really cool signpost ornament I got in New Orleans a couple months before I moved back from Dallas.[4] There’s a relatively expensive Chicago ornament my sister got me at the kriskindlmarket before I went to Texas that cause me no small amount of anxiety when I couldn’t find it in 2010. There’s also a little wooden Noah’s Ark that I have been hanging on Christmas trees for as long as I’ve known what Christmas tree are.

I’m sitting in my living room right now, lit only by the screen of my laptop and the lights on my tree and wrapped around the banister because I never got over my love of Christmas lights. When I look at my tree I can see the Texas flag, the Marshall Field’s clock, the New Orleans ornament, the gorilla, the Kriskindlmarket ornament, and the wooden Noah’s Ark. All of those ornaments are reminders of who I am, where I’ve been, and what Christmas has been over the years. All of those ornaments are reminders of why I love Christmas.

I didn’t love Christmas my last few years as a Christian. That’s why I feel bad for Pat Robertson when I see that clip from the start of this post. I was constantly worried that I wasn’t celebrating Christmas properly, that I wasn’t being appropriately reverent. It was a continual existential crisis that I can feel from Pat Robertson in that little sigh at the end of the resigned, “It’s Christmas all over again.”

That’s what fundamentalism is all about, after all. It’s the meaning behind these continuing culture wars. Pat Robertson only sees two ways of doing things: the right way and the wrong way. At one point I only saw two ways of doing things: the right way and the wrong way. Pat Robertson sees, as I once did, the wrong way as an explicit repudiation and negation of the right way and, therefore, as a declaration of war.

Pat Robertson is wrong, just as I was once wrong. There is no War on Christmas. There are no angry Grinches coming to steal the holiday. The only eyes that can possibly see that war are eyes that only see a binary world with a circumscribed right and nearly infinite wrong.

I love Christmas way more now than I did a few years ago. I love it so much that I broke with my new tradition this year to set up my tree a week early and go out to buy garlands and lights to wrap around my new (and, might I add, newly refinished) banister. I was so excited I went and bought Daisy a Christmas stocking to hang on my new fireplace even though she’s a dog and has no idea what’s going on. In Pat Robertson’s world, however, I’m at war with Christmas, I hate Christmas, and I’m miserable.

I find that odd. I’m not the one sighing after saying, “It’s Christmas all over again,” after all. I only see one miserable person when I watch that video and the person I see is Pat Robertson.

This is much bigger than Christmas, too. As an Evangelical I was obsessed with doing things right. I gradually became aware of the fact that the “right” thing was usually an extremely narrow interpretation of reality. Now that I’ve separated myself from that world I’ve realized that anything and everything that’s not “right” has now been interpreted as being at war against those who are “right.”

This, ultimately, is why Evangelicals[5] see gay marriage, sex outside of marriage, abortion, and any number of other things as being “anti-Christian.” They simply cannot fathom a world where there is a spectrum of beliefs and lifestyles, all of which are equally valid. To them there is the right way and the wrong way and the right way and the wrong way are engaged in an eternal, zero-sum struggle.

I find that funny, honestly. I also find it depressing. I say this as someone who has come to appreciate Christmas a little more every year for the last five years. I say this as someone who has come to appreciate Christmas a little more every year precisely because I’ve spent the last five years celebrating it the wrong way. It’s funny how that works.

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[1]I like to think my love of Harry Connick, Jr. is well documented. If you don’t like it, you can suck it.

[2]Chicagans hate that Marshall Field’s is now a Macy’s. It’s a two-fer of a grand Chicago icon disappearing and being replaced by a New York (ptooey) icon. I thought it was awful at first. Now I’m pretty meh about the whole thing. Field’s was owned by Target for a few years before the end, after all. And I think Macy’s has done its best to maintain its own brand while respecting the history of Field’s. They’ve kept a lot of the iconography of that venerable Chicago institution while haphazardly slapping their brand atop it. That, when it gets right down to it, is about as truly American as you can get. I mean, seriously, we have the Washington Redskins, the Cleveland Indians, the University of Illinois Illini. Macy’s taking over Marshall Field’s and adding the Macy’s star to the iconic Marshall Field’s clock, putting Miracle on 34th Street-themed windows up on State Street, and selling Frango Mints in Macy’s bags is THE MOST AMERICAN FUCKING THING I CAN IMAGINE. U-S-A! U-S-A!

[3]Which, on the subject of Marshall Field’s and Macy’s, is now the Palmer House Hilton. But no one seems to complain much about that. Also, it has an astonishing lobby:

That lobby is also awesome because it’s on the second floor, so you come in from street level into a pretty normal looking arcade, then ride an escalator up and gradually the scope of this amazing room reveals itself. To this day I’d rather stay in a century old boutique hotel than some ultra-modern resort because they remind me of the Palmer House even if nothing is quite like the Palmer House.

[4]Funny story on that one, too. I found it in a little shop in the French Quarter and bought it as a souvenir. The next morning I decided to go back and get them as presents for my parents and sister/bro-in-law from NOLA. There was only one signpost. But there was also an ornament with a Mississippi paddle wheeler that I want to say was the Delta Queen but probably wasn’t. I thought, “Well, I guess I could get this.” At some point shortly thereafter it occurred to me that my mother loves Mississippi River paddle wheelers in general and the Delta Queen in particular on a level that’s roughly equivalent to my love of Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers. It was the most completely appropriate thing I could have gotten my mother and I bought it as a, “Eh, I guess this will do,” sort of afterthought. The lesson, as always, is that my instincts are often way better than my actual brain.

[5]With exceptions, of course, Fred Clark being a shining example. But it’s so hard to parse these things that I use “Evangelicals” in the “Evangelical voting bloc” sense because there’s only so much time I want to spend adjectivising this idea.

11/27/2012

And, really, if you know anything about Cameron's last couple years on Growing Pains, King looks like he's pretty much doing the exact same thing that Kirk did. The weird thing here, of course, is that King's arguments against watching the very show he's on are correct, just for the exact and total wrong reasons. It is a crap show and it is utter filth, just, y'know, not on a moral level, more on an art and quality level. So that's neat.

Also, too, it looks like this The Forerunner guy is all set up to be his Ray Comfort. So, hey! Somebody get him a banana.

09/04/2012

Y'know what? I had a third post all ready to go on my reaction toPZ Myers and Atheism+. Of course by "all ready to go" I meant "I knew what I was gonna say, but I hadn't gotten around to saying it." Labor Day Weekend isn't exactly a vacation for me. Although I don't know if I technically "work," since I don't get paid for any of the stuff I do.

Meh. It's fun.

Either way, the problem I have with atheism as a whole boils down to this: the gatekeepers of the movement are, by and large, immature brats. Atheism as a movement is not even remotely ready for prime time and that's because the people who speak for it with the loudest and most influential voices are far more interested in making sure everyone knows how clever and interesting and intellectual they are.

It's a collection of internet slacktivists who are going to turn on each other at the drop of a hat because that's what people do on the internet. They don't seem to realize that sometimes you have to ally yourself with people who hold some divergent, distastful views to solve a bigger problem that can't be handled alone. They don't seem to realize that public mockery of the very first response they see to something they don't like isn't the way to solve most problems.

They don't seem to understand that you can't solve problems overnight and you can't solve them with ridicule. They don't seem to understand that if you throw a temper tantrum, shake your fists, and screech, "FIX THIS NOW OR I'M LEAVING!" most people will respond with, "Good riddance!"

If you want to rid a movement of distasteful attitudes you can do one of three things: you can try to kick out the riff-raff, you can leave and create your own, or you can try to have a conversation. Quite frankly, atheism never seems to try that third option. It seems to be a collection of people who see themselves as rugged individualists who are all, to a person, the smartest one in the room. So, obviously, anyone who disagrees with them must be a dipshit and anyone who adopts a similar position to the person who disagrees with them must be engaged in some sort of collectivist hivemind and also guilty by association of the greatest ills espoused by the original idiot.

It's sad that Atheism+ is the thing that brings me to this point. I fundamentally agree with the aims of Atheism+, after all. I simply was never invested in atheism as a movement, so I never had to worry too much about assholes turning something I loved into a playground for misogynistic assholes.

But this is the problem: I'm as impartial an outside observer as you're probably going to find. I keep up with the general trends in the atheism movement because it interests me. I'm not really impartial, though, as I also have a long-standing rooting interest on the side of egalitarianism and feminism and I'm against racism and anti-gay bigotry in all its forms. Hell, Pharyngula was one of the first atheism blogs I ever read and I've been a loyal lurker over there for the past several years.

I've gotten the impression at several points that PZ is little more than a petulant child when forced to deal with disagreement. It's usually, I'll admit, amusing to watch him go off and I consider the fact that he's generally acting on the side of the better angels a reason to give him a free pass or at least another chance.

But just as a screaming toddler gets old after a while, PZ's shtick has gotten tiresome. So I suppose the point of my two posts on why I wouldn't be joining Atheism+ can more accurately be described as two posts on why I'm done reading Pharyngula. This doesn't mean that I'm going to join the Atheist+ camp, though. It actually means that I'm probably severing what little connection I have to atheism as a movement, since Dispatches from the Culture Wars will be the only Freethought Blog still in my reader and the only other explicitly atheist blogs I read are Unreasonable Faith and The Way Forward, neither of which seem to worry overmuch about atheism as a movement. Also, too, I REALLY need to update my links sidebar one of these days...

So now that I find I actually have time to write again, I'm going to go back to writing about things that matter to me. That means that I won't be writing much of anything about atheism as a movement, Atheism+ as a thing, or PZ Myers anymore.

08/23/2012

I recently learned that animatronic singer simulator Taylor Swift has a specific dating MO. First she gets all obsessed about a guy. Then she gets really, really clingy. Then she dumps him out of the blue. Then she writes chirpy country-pop songs about how he's the worst person ever.

Then, approximately 6 months to 1 year later, I'm subjected to those songs over the PA at the grocery store while I'm trying to purchase dishwasher detergent.[1] Yes, I'm a fortunate soul who almost never has to hear Taylor Swift, but that's beside the point. Anyway, I have several questions:

1. This information made me feel slightly bad for a Jonas brother for about twelve seconds. Has anyone in the history of ever felt bad for a Jonas brother aside from that brief moment?

2. Knowin this, why the fuck would anyone date Taylor Swift?

3. If anyone really, really wanted to date Taylor Swift, would anyone notice if they just got a RealDoll modeled after Taylor Swift and put an mp3 player in its head?

4. Is it really healthy to give teenagers (and, um, I don't know how old Taylor Swift is, but I know she was, like, 16 when she had her first big break) a public platform upon which to do all the stupid shit that teenagers are prone to do? I mean, it's one thing if she was your standard high school/college girl doing the standard dumbass dating cycle, but now she's got legions of adoring fans and makes a crapload of money running through this cycle. That seems like the worst possible kind of enabling.

5. Most importantly, now that I know this, how do I get back to a point where I don't know this?

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[1]I own a dishwasher. Ask me about how that's working out one of these days.

08/16/2012

In case anyone’s wondering, I’m very much not dead. I’ve just been…busy. Really busy.

So, to recap, I bought a house on April 20th. I finally moved in to said house about two and a half weeks ago. It’s been kinda weird, too, since I now live in Wheaton, Illinois, known to most at the place where Wheaton College and the Billy Graham Center are. To me, it’s my hometown. Which, if I’m honest, is kinda weird, too. I never intended to move back here. Hell, on a fundamental level I never wanted to move back here. Yet, here I am.

I’m still trying to adjust to the notion. I’m also still trying to get a sense of how my schedule is going to work. I’ve got some ideas kicking around in the back of my head about what to do with the blog and my writing and any number of other things.

For the moment, though – and especially for the last two weeks or so – it’s just nice to be able to sit on my couch in my house and, y’know, just sit.

But, in case you want to see a few things, here are some pictures.

There’s my car, parked in my garage (this is kind of a big deal to me):

There’s the TV in my office, which may or may not be attached to a NES, a SNES, and a N64. Are you jealous? You should be jealous:

And here’s Daisy, trying to eat her way through a chain link fence:

There was a softball game on the other side of that fence. She really, really wanted to play softball.

03/29/2012

So I was on the train into Chicago this morning having a Google chat with a friend who currently resides in Tokyo. As Wil Wheaton has been known to say, I love living in the future.

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Curb Tacos

I can't decide if that's the band name of the day or the nickname for a horrible venereal disease of the day.

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"A Distant, Dreadful Star" hasn't gone away. It just won't be back until next week at this rate. I had written Part 11, but it's a jump and I suddenly realized that Part 10 couldn't just end that particular strain. This is the difficulty in writing a long project based on, "Hey, this is a good idea!" followed by, "I totally know what the first six pages will be!" It quickly falls apart if you're not on top of it.

Chances are I'll do an On the Writing of "A Distant, Dreadful Star" post pretty soon. If there's one thing I love more than writing, it's writing about writing.

03/23/2012

Fridays are usually pretty dead at the office. Lots of people work from home or work off-site, and Friday is an especially popular day for all that. On this particular week a good chunk of the department, including most of the Friday regulars, are off in A Whale's Vagina, too, so there's that.

It's also rainy, gray, and bleak in Chicago, which is especially depressing after a run of decidedly un-March-like sun and warmth. So the rain, gray, and generally empty office caused this exchange:

Me: I'm going to put a sign out on the door that says, "Welcome to the zombie apocalypse."

Co-Worker: The only problem with that is that no one is here to read it.

03/16/2012

No "A Distant, Dreadful Star" today, folks. I've been flu-ing it up lately and I lack the ability to, y'know, do things.

So, instead, watch this:

And when you get tired of that...aw, who the hell am I kidding? It's impossible to get tired of the taaaaaaale of Captain Jack Sparrow. If you're anything like me, and god knows you poor bastards probably are, you're just gonna watch this over and over and over and over again.